Still shambling the streets of the city Nelson Algren defined, I am the Monster in a madhouse refined. Burma Shave.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Cheap Seats

Tomorrow the Cubs come back to Wrigley Field for the end of the season. Two things my dad will watch, the Cubs and the Weather Channel. Better than some people who watch Fox News 24/7. The photos I've posted are taken twenty years apart. The ticket is for the first night game, which happened to be a rain out. The night games played a big part of why the signage and the rooftop bleachers kept growing. And still are. The last time I was actually at a Cubs game was in August 1986, a month before my dad had his first stroke. Before they added walls around the outfield, I was able to get off the el at Addison and sit there, watching the game and writing in my commonplace book. Often quite windy, but now all you can see is a sliver of the field. For me, this week is the end of summer, and I'll watch some of the game tomorrow with my dad in a detached, sleepy sort of way. The shadows are sharper, the afternoon sky almost orange.

An aside. I've made several posts about Telstar, not just the song by the Tornadoes, but the entry about the Telstar three-fold I received from Marty Mundt and after a few weeks, encased it in Mylar and sent it along to Capcom. I happened to be reading up on it yesterday, and this is what made me throw this entry together tonight. Telstar was set to transmit an address from President Kennedy for a few brief moments--this was July of 1962--and to fill the void, a few seconds of a ball game between the Cubs and Phillies aired. Then JFK. And, a few hours later, a nuclear explosion in the stratosphere, code-named Starfish Prime, fried all of Telstar's circuits. Our government at work. They actually make the Cubs look good.